After 16 months, I'm down to my last handful of courses before the completion of my BS Cloud Computing degree. All that's left to do is schedule my ITILv4 exam, write the papers for Emerging Technologies, Cloud Architecture, and Automation & Scaling Tools, and come up with my Capstone.

Some background on me: I'm a Site Reliability Engineer who's been working in tech for close to a decade now, and in SRE/DevOps for the last 5 years. Most of this program has consisted of material I'm already very familiar with, sometimes to my chagrin. (Really, you want me to virtualize a datacenter in VMWare?) I'm glad I've been able to round out my knowledge and fill in some gaps I probably wouldn't have uncovered outside of an academic setting, and I'm looking forward to finally having a degree next to my professional qualifications.

My term ends at the end of November, though I'm not going to have access to a computer to work on the degree for most of November, so I'm aggressively targeting the beginning of November. Fortunately I front-loaded the work I figured would be difficult or time-consuming- my day job is literally doing cloud architecture, creating and managing automation systems, and implementing emerging technologies. (In the financial services sector, no less!)

I would like to gather some insight as I head into the final stretch though:

• Do I really have to install the PeopleCert software and take the ITILv4 exam at home? After the nightmare that was dealing with PearsonVUE, I ended up doing all of the CompTIA, LPI, and AWS exams at a test center, and I'd rather do that if I can.
• What's a reasonable and realistic scope for the capstone project on a BS-CC degree? The open-ended nature tends to give me analysis paralysis.
• I've heard talk of extensions for capstones. What's the deal with that?

Thanks everyone, and stay tuned for the inevitable rant about outdated nonsense on this program after I finish it!